A Study On Metaphors In Romance Of The Three Kingdoms Translated By Moss Roberts From The Perspective Of Conceptual Metaphor

Conceptual Metaphor argues that metaphors are pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. We understand or express a concept with a concept that we already have in mind. This theory, when applied to the trans-cultural activity of "translation", requires us to switch between metaphorical thoughts in different cultures flexibly.Although Chinese and English share some basic metaphors, the Chinese ones have a wider radiation, making Chinese a more colorful language. Some Chinese metaphors have corresponding English versions; some need dynamic translation, while others have to be left out due to metaphorical thoughts generated from different history among nations.This paper aims at analyzing the orientational metaphors, entity and substance metaphors and new metaphors appeared in Romance of the Three Kingdoms and their translation by Moss Roberts on the basis of conceptual metaphors by comparing the original Chinese and the translation and also by investigating how the translator deals with different types of metaphors. This paper also tries to explore the relationship between metaphorical thoughts and translation strategies. At the end of the paper, limitation of metaphor translation and hope for future metaphor studies are mentioned.